Michigan

Woe, Speed Racer, woe!

Is it too soon to declare SPEED RACER the first major casualty of the 2008 summer movie season? Maybe so, but the would-be blockbuster based on the 1960s Japanese animated series is definitely having a rough ride at the box office.

Emile Hirsch plays the title role in the ultra-elaborate SPEED RACER, which didn't exactly take off with moviegoers in its opening weekend.

Not only was the Wachowski Brothers ultra-elaborate adventure clobbered by IRON MAN, it even wound up taking in less money per screen than the less-than-sensational WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS, starring Cameron Diaz and Ashton Kutcher. Early estimates indicate that SPEED RACER made approximately $20.2 million in its first three days, compared to the $50.5 million taken in by IRON MAN. VEGAS reportedly banked $20 million, but it grossed about $6,200 per screen while SPEED was making $5,600.

Critics have not been kind to SPEED either. The film has a weak 35 percent positive rating at Rotten Tomatoes. "Yes, it's a candy-colored Day-Glo world, but there's a liveliness missing from this lead-footed 'Speed Racer,'" wrote USA Today critic Claudia Puig in a one-and-a-half-star review. "This toxic admixture of computer-generated frenzy and live-action torpor succeeds in being, almost simultaneously, genuinely painful -- the esthetic equivalent of needles in eyeballs -- and weirdly benumbing, like eye candy laced with lidocaine," noted the Wall Street Journal's Joe Morgenstern, who went on to call it "a nightmare vision of children's entertainment."

And I must commend the Grand Rapids Press' John Serba for this astute observation: "A little goes a long way, and a lot results in a sickly buzz, followed by exhaustion and a migraine. Or, as my observant wife so concisely proclaimed it, 'visual throw-up.'"